Dan Haar: NBC's Stamford 'Olympics Factory' A Non-Stop Machine

February 15, 2014|Dan Haar

STAMFORD — Everything seems relaxed in a control room deep inside the massive NBC Sports Group headquarters in Stamford, where nine people, mostly men in their 20s and 30s, monitor video feeds from the Sochi Olympics, their chatter subdued.

This isn't just any control room. With hundreds of small and tiny screens, and glass walls that reveal rooms full of servers, it's the nerve center where every feed from Russia, raw video as well as produced shows, arrives for American audiences.

A few yards away, Sarah Hughes, the 2002 Olympic champion figure skater, watches the action in a studio where she appears in her daily, half-hour show called "Olympic Ice" for the NBC Sports web site — one of several shows produced in Stamford, 5,300 miles from Sochi.

Suddenly at 10 a.m. — or in the control room, 7 p.m. Olympics time — transmission engineer David Steinberg breaks the silence. "Whoa, breakup on MDS! There's a major hitch going on MDS 3!"

He writes in a log. The outbreak in the "multiple distribution service" line was a blip so fleeting that an untrained eye might have missed it. But to Steinberg and the crew at NBC Sports, it was the kind of small problem that could lead to a big problem and needed attention right away.

All was calm. A picture emerges when we multiply that scene times 80 separate feeds coming into the studios in Stamford, the headquarters of an NBC Sports empire that will deliver 1,539 hours of Sochi coverage on multiple online, broadcast and cable platforms.

Unlike the Super Bowl or other one-time, one-venue events, Olympics coverage is a choreographed marathon of nonstop details, constant activity with no single climax. When Shaun White took his much anticipated turn on the half-pipe at 8:30 a.m. Tuesday, most people in this building were watching something else — finding a highlight in an overnight cross-country race or preparing a script for a curling broadcast that is produced with an anchor on a set right in Stamford.

"I always think of it as a factory getting things to market," said Tim Canary, the vice president of engineering, who started at NBC more than 15 years ago in his early 30s. As we left the control room where Steinberg worked, Canary added, "That is shipping and receiving."

'Lucky To Be Here'

Acting as the trucks, in this case, is a fiber-optic cable the thickness of a human hair, with a back-up line between Stamford and Sochi that takes a completely different route, contracted through AT&T. There's a satellite feed just in case both cables fail. NBC, after all, paid $4.4 billion for the rights to all four Olympic games from 2014 through 2020, so the signal absolutely, positively has to get here.

This factory, built up from the floor of a former Clairol hair dye plant, is backed by tens of millions of dollars of state money. Gov. Dannel P. Malloy made NBC Sports Group one of the state's "First Five" companies in 2011, with a $20 million, low-interest loan that will most likely be forgiven if NBC Sports keeps at least 600 people here.

On top of that, NBC Sports is eligible for Connecticut's film and digital tax credits for building the 300,000-square-foot facility that opened just over a year ago, and for ongoing work. The company — part of NBCUniversal, a subsidiary of Comcast — collected $23.5 million in credits in December and will gain more credits worth millions for the production work.

Down a long hall flanked by six large TV studios on one side and production rooms on the other, we arrive at a control room for the curling events. Curling is produced for both TV and online in Stamford, complete with play-by-play reporting from the studios.

Thirteen people sit in three rows facing the screens, watching five separate feeds of curling venues, all inactive — but that's about to change.

"Two minutes to air," the director yells out. She gives a 10-second countdown to 1, and someone shouts, "Roll!" The show opens with a feed from Sochi, a highlight with a host saying, "This is the kind of performance you just dream to have!"

Across the hall, the lean, angular, affable Fred Roggin opens the curling segment. "So far the American women are not looking like medal contenders," he declares from behind an anchor desk.

No surprise there. Still, curling has become respectably popular among American fans, so much so that Mark Lazarus, the NBC Sports chairman, remarked on it in a conference call from Sochi on Wednesday. Viewers will see the segment hours later, but it's recorded as if it's live.

In his regular job, Roggin is "the sports guy" as KNBC-TV in Los Angeles. Like Hughes, he's one of many people in and out of the far-flung NBC operations who's brought in for Olympics coverage. "I feel lucky to be here," Roggin said on a break in the studio.